When you’ve put time and money into a business that you started from the ground up, the last thing you want to experience are business killers.
“Too often, businesses large and small focus on external risks while ignoring internal ones,” Laura Stack wrote in this Business Journals article. “But sometimes failure is an inside job. Low profile, basic flaws have killed far more businesses than corporate malfeasance, murderous debt, or even bad marketing.”
Stack lays out five major killers:
Too much “green personnel”
“External dangers will always threaten businesses — that’s a given,” she wrote. “But we’re just as likely to hurt ourselves, because we rarely take internal threats as seriously as external ones.”
When Strack means “green personnel,” she means young and eager employees without the same amount of experience of others. Not that these kinds of employees are a threat. Far from it, actually. It’s important that green personnel work with experienced workers who have weathered the tides and the ups and downs of the past. Younger employees can be highly important in terms of keeping up with new and emerging trends while older employees can stay in touch with where things are going.
Disengaged workers
With disengaged workers, if they aren’t motivated to do a great job, it will repeatedly create problems. Communicate with them, but talk to them as humans. Threatening with condescending lines like “be thankful you have a job,” doesn’t make people want to stay in a job. It sucks motivation out of them and creates a negative environment.
Lack of vision
Having different views on the company’s vision can be a great way to be flexible. Make changes with shifting customer wants and needs when they come. Yet if these views are leading to a lack of vision, that can lead to something like a dog constantly chasing its tail.
Brittleness
Being brittle and refusing to change with shifting needs and wants can leave you left behind. Stack points to Hostess Brands as an example. “The management at Hostess Brands led their company into bankruptcy twice, in part because they ignored a growing consumer interest in healthy alternatives to their sugary snacks,” she wrote.
Stagnation
Similar to other killers, being in a state of stagnation is probably the biggest killer. “Survival requires growth, which requires innovation — a firm commitment to consistently creating and nurturing new ideas,” Stack wrote.
Ask yourself if your company is avoiding these killers. Try to see potential threats and solve them in a healthy way.
